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Wednesday, March 19, 2014

‘Perfect storm’ of crises could unravel global system!

This NASA Earth Observatory
image shows a storm system circling around an area of extreme low
pressure in 2010, which many scientists attribute to climate change.
Photograph: AFP/Getty Images.

(Natural and social scientists develop new model of how ‘perfect storm’ of crises could unravel global system.)

Dear Readers: This article is important enough that we are featuring it in its entirety!

By Nafeez Ahmed:

A new study sponsored by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center has
highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could
collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation
and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.
Noting that warnings of ‘collapse’ are often seen to be fringe or
controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical
data showing that “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a
recurrent cycle found throughout history.” Cases of severe
civilisational disruption due to “precipitous collapse – often lasting
centuries – have been quite common.”
The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary ‘Human And
Nature DYnamical’ (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa
Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center,
in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study
based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the
peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.
It finds that according to the historical record even advanced,
complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions
about the sustainability of modern civilisation:

“The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not
more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many
advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that
advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both
fragile and impermanent.”

By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of
collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors
which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the
risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture,
and Energy.
These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two
crucial social features: “the stretching of resources due to the strain
placed on the ecological carrying capacity”; and “the economic
stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”)
[poor]” These social phenomena have played “a central role in the
character or in the process of the collapse,” in all such cases over
“the last five thousand years.”
Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly
to overconsumption of resources, with “Elites” based largely in
industrialised countries responsible for both:

“… accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed
throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass
of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a
small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence
levels.”

The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency:

“Technological change can raise the efficiency of
resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource
consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy
effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the
increased efficiency of resource use.”

Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two
centuries has come from “increased (rather than decreased) resource
throughput,” despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period.
Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharri and his
colleagues conclude that under conditions “closely reflecting the
reality of the world today… we find that collapse is difficult to
avoid.” In the first of these scenarios, civilisation:

“…. appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long
time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very
small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much,
resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the
collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse
is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers,
rather than a collapse of Nature.”

Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource
exploitation, finding that “with a larger depletion rate, the decline of
the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but
eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites.”
In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are
buffered from the most “detrimental effects of the environmental
collapse until much later than the Commoners”, allowing them to
“continue ‘business as usual’ despite the impending catastrophe.” The
same mechanism, they argue, could explain how “historical collapses were
allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the
catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan
cases).”
Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that:

“While some members of society might raise the alarm that
the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore
advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and
their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the
long sustainable trajectory ‘so far’ in support of doing nothing.”

However, the scientists point out that the worst-case scenarios are
by no means inevitable, and suggest that appropriate policy and
structural changes could avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a
more stable civilisation.
The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to
ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce
resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources
and reducing population growth:

“Collapse can be avoided and population can reach
equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a
sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably
equitable fashion.”

The NASA-funded HANDY model offers a highly credible wake-up call to
governments, corporations and business – and consumers – to recognise
that ‘business as usual’ cannot be sustained, and that policy and
structural changes are required immediately.
Although the study is largely theoretical, a number of other more empirically-focused studies – by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science
for instance – have warned that the convergence of food, water and
energy crises could create a ‘perfect storm’ within about fifteen years.
But these ‘business as usual’ forecasts could be very conservative.Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists